Hi everyone!
I am planning on putting together some testimonial ads for a great client of mine who runs a used car dealership. He has given me a list of contact info for several satisfied customers. I gave a quick call to each of them to see if they would be willing to come in to share and record their experiences and praises, and everyone I was able to reach was enthusiastically on board with it.
This is my first attempt at creating testimonial advertisements. Do you have any helpful tips, advice, or interesting techniques to make these ads more effective?
A few details: My client is running 6 :60 spots a day, Mon-Sat, for the next 52 weeks (I know, right?), so I plan on making at least 3 different ads and scheduling them to rotate throughout the day so it's not the exact same ad repeated over and over.
Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
The most effective approach with testimonials is this:
1. clarify with the client what the objectives of using testimonials are - more specifically what qualities of the dealership are the testimonials supposed to present and reinforce.
2. ask the client to pick clients for whom he was able to sell for specific reasons - one because of the selection, one because of the pricing, one because of the safety features the dealer recommended for the buyer's teenage driver, that the dealer delivered the vehicle to their house. That kind of thing. If you don't do this you will get a series of almost identical testimonials about how 'nice' the dealer is, in a 'nice' location with 'a lot' of 'nice' cars.
3. look on the list of customers the client gave you for: older, young, male, female, family. You could end up with all older males or only females. You want it to sound like everyone shops at this dealership.
4. DO NOT EVER SCRIPT THE TESTIMONIALS!!!. When recording the testimonials, review with the person what dealership quality/experience you want them to address, then just turn on the mic and record:
- their name and city they are from in their own words. Can just be 'I'm Mary from Reed City', 'This is John Smith. My wife and I live in Tustin.', 'This is Bill Jones and I've lived in Big Rapids my whole life'.
- have them tell the story about how or what they experienced. DON'T INTERRUPT! You can prompt a little but nothing more. People are uncomfortable and will start giving monosyllabic answers if you start with a series of questions. But people like telling stories, explaining events that happen to them.
- one reminder before and possibly a prompt during is that the person being recorded says the name of the dealership. You could record all the customers the client gave you and they all refer to 'they', 'then they called me...', 'they arranged the financing so fast...'. The testimonials will sound like these people could be talking about any dealership. WARNING: salespeople come and go at a dealership or business so it's better to get the testimonials to refer to the dealership by name - not the salesperson or the F&I person.
- I transcribe the recordings for edit - it's easier for production if they have a script with edits to work from. You may get more than one final spot from any one testimonial. You can also initially edit each testimonial into one spot. Then... pick themes, e.g., service and open the spot with the anncr and use a series of short edits from all the testimonials collectively in one spot. There are a lot of ways to mix and match editing with testimonials.
All of this is to accomplish meaningful testimonials that sound sincere, are in the customer's own words and are on point as far as projecting the image of the dealership for service, sales, pricing, selection, location, ease of purchasing, etc.
This is all excellent advice, Diane! Thank you so much for sharing your extremely helpful points. I especially appreciate the tip on transcribing the recordings. I'm sure I'll be able to create several different spots with the number of people I have coming in to record and having every spoken word in writing will make it a lot easier to choose the theme for each spot. Thanks again!
Looking at the frequency you listed you will have to record more testimonials in 3 months, then in another 3 months. With a cache of 12+ you will be able to rotate these in and out enough so that it doesn't sound like the client has a total of 4 or 5 customers. Testimonials do not have a great life span if over-run. If you cycle them in and out, adding new ones periodically, the campaign will be more effective.
Note as well that testimonials are branding by nature. So mixing other non-testimonials in the schedule that are sales-directed about service, some pricing on vechicles, high trade-in values, et al will make the scheduling you have more effecitve.
Say 'hi', to Julie for me!
Yes, I planned on keeping the ad campaign fresh by running 3 different spots twice a day for just a few months at a time. If I can produce a high number of quality ads, I might just switch them out monthly. I'll run just one or two of the testimonial ads in the set and have sales-oriented ads in the mix as well. Being able to create a few different spots from each recorded interview will be quite helpful, and I'll be sure to have a diverse set of satisfied customers.
Thanks once again for all of your help, Diane. Julie was pleased to hear your name and says 'hi' right back.
Joe,
Echoing Diane's advice, testimonials can be powerfully persuasive, if they come across as genuine. Very few people can sound authentic when reading a script - even one they wrote to tell their own story.
Recording conversations from which the story is uncovered is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process...and absolutely worth the investment. I've uploaded a few examples from my own clients below.
Don't try to cram too much into each spot. Keep the story moving along conversationally. If necessary, tell it in installments.
Resist the urge to have a local announcer tell the listener what he or she is hearing. ("Joe Fibeetz, talking about his experience with Fred Smith Motors...") Mostly it's like someone giving a Powerpoint presentation, reading the same words that are already on the slides. It took me years to learn this lesson. I thought the ad would be better if I jumped in to "steer" it. Wrong-o. Try telling the story without a narrator. Use one only when continuity would suffer and leave the listener confused without it.
Avoid dating the spots and you can build a library of commercials that can be trotted out from time to time - as Diane also suggested. Remember David Ogilvy's advice: You're not advertising to a standing army, but to a moving parade. The ad that worked last year will probably work as well this year. Advertisers and radio folks tire of repetition a lot sooner than the folks we're trying to influence. Besides, repetition is the mother of learning. People don't listen nearly are carefully as we would like to think they do. I have a client who used to change his daily spot every two weeks. When circumstances necessitated running the ad an extra week, he noticed a jump in feedback. Now he runs an ad three weeks before changing. (And, while this is most certainly extreme, I also have a client who runs a full-sing 30-second jingle at least 100 times a month, who hasn't changed his ad in nearly 20 years, with NO ill effect upon his business. In fact, just the opposite. But he's definitely the exception, not the rule.)
Love to hear your ads when you've created them!
When creating this type of ad, I've found it much more effective if the recordings have a "man on the street" type of feel. As mentioned, it's VERY important for this to NOT sound scripted. Make sure you continuously record the interviewer and customer (ending up with one file) that you can clip/edit later. This will give you a good flow. Do this and you'll be sure to have the feel you are looking for.
Thanks so much, Rod! I'll try to make sure the story is told through the testimonial, not the narration. Great advice!
I'll make a note to post some of the ads in the "Spot Check" - Commercial Review Group when I get them finished.
Thank you, Wally. I plan on having my client's customers come in to record in the studio, but I won't be putting words in their mouths. I'll just let the story flow naturally. Is that what you mean by "man on the street", or would you suggest I go out to meet them with a TASCAM recorder, as opposed to the better sound quality of a recording studio?
Reading the other responses reminded me, too, Joe that if you run testimonials over a long period - a year? - it's not a bad idea to add in occasional dealer testimonials. What I mean is that you have the customers talking about the dealer and you can have the dealer talking about how much they like their customers, enjoy helping them out, finding what the customers want, how much they appreciate their customers choosing them and see it as a huge compliment that a customer returns to make another purchase.
I just feel the more you can do to make sure it sounds less set up, the more believable/legitimate it will be to the listener.
Joe,
Studio's fine, but there's nothing wrong with using a portable recorder in the field and getting the ambience of the location in the background. The sound quality isn't nearly as important as the content. That said, I record a lot of client audio in their places of business and the quality has never suffered for it. Won a Mercury with such a recording 11 years ago, made in an upstairs office above the music store on a portable Walkman mini-disc recorder. The quality of the microphones in today's digital recorders is even better. Best advice I can give you is to record wherever your subject will feel most at ease.
As promised, I uploaded a couple of the finished testimonials to the Spot Check group, but I figured I'd add them here as well.
Thanks so much, everyone!
Let me know what you think.
Read this repeatedly. Share it generously. Diane has provided PERFECT advice.
